1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to color barcodes, and in particular, it relates to a two-dimensional color barcode and methods for generating and decoding such two-dimensional color barcodes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Barcodes are a form of machine-readable symbology for recording digital information. One-dimensional and two-dimensional black and white barcodes have been widely used. Many barcode formats have been developed, some examples of which are described in “BarCode-1, 2-Dimension Bar Code Page”, http://www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/stack.html. To increase data capacity, two dimensional color barcodes have been proposed, which use color to represent information. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,070,805 describes a distortion-resistant color barcode symbology that uses two sets of colors (red, green, and blue, and cyan, magenta and yellow). In another example, commonly owned U.S. Patent Application Publication 2005/0284944 A1 entitled “Color barcode producing, reading and/or reproducing method and apparatus” describes using six colors (red, orange, blue, green, yellow and pink) in a color barcode.